Is that... what we want?

To just wipe away the last tear, and be done? For the last time, yes! Wake up from the Dragon-Tyrant's spell!

You could cut out just the intolerable parts of pain? It is all tolerable. Or intolerable. You'd better define your terms.

Keep the sort of pain that tells you not to stick your finger in the fire Just regenerate the finger.

grinds down and destroys a mind Does pain actually do that? Have we done experiments showing that's the case?

Or configure minds to be harder to damage One of Judith Harris' points is that minds are designed to be resilient, which is why child abuse doesn't have the effect many assume it does.

No child sexual abuse that turns out more abusers. Are you sure you've got the causation right there? Couldn't it be that abusive people are likely to be related to other abusive people?

or AIDS This is a less serious criticism of Eliezer than the others, but it's funny how often people go on about this rather easily preventable disease that kills a lot fewer people than diseases that get much less attention (various tropical diseases in Africa, a huge list of cancers in the U.S). Other diseases need better marketing and market segmentation research.

Is there a point where Romeo and Juliet just seems less and less relevant, more and more a relic of some distant forgotten world Eliminating out-group hatred alone would do that.

Asking what happens often, and binding happy emotions to that, so as to increase happiness - or asking what seems easy, and binding happy emotions to that - making isolated video games artificially more emotionally involving, for example -

At that point, it seems to me, you've pretty much given up on eudaimonia and moved to maximizing happiness; you might as well replace brains with pleasure centers, and civilizations with hedonium plasma. Well, why not? What makes changing the external stimulus more worthwhile than the subjective experience of it? It can't be that you hold the emotions evolution gave us as sacred or you wouldn't want to eliminate racial prejudice.

However, I would hope you realize the danger of assuming all gendered traits are "hard wired" into the brain; amongst other problems, that can support the idea that the much greater incidence of men committing acts of violence is "natural male aggression" that we can't ever eliminate. Leaving aside the question of whether or not that belief is accurate, if it hypothetically was would you still discourage someone from voicing it for reasons other than truth?

The society of Brave New World actually seemed like quite an improvement to me.

Tabarrok casts some doubt on the negative externality of wealthy peers: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/home-envy.html

I would say the revealed preference of migration supports him.

I recall in one of the Discworld novels the smallest unit of time is defined as the period in which the universe is destroyed and then recreated. If that were continually happening (perhaps even in a massively parallel manner)? What difference does that make? Building on some of Eliezer's earlier writing on zombies and quantum clones, I say none at all. Just as the simulated person in a human's dream is irrelevant once forgotten. It's possible that I myself am a simulation and in that case I don't want my torture to be simulated (at least in this instance, I have no problem constructing another simulation/clone of me that gets tortured), but I can't retroactively go back and prevent my simulator from creating me in order to torture me.

I okayed mothers committing full-blown infanticide here.

ShardPhoenix, you may be interested in this book [shameless plug]

I second nominull. I don't recall Eliezer saying much about the moral-status of (non-human) animals, though it could be that I've just forgotten.

Democracy is a dumb idea. I vote for aristocracy/apartheid. Considering the disaster of the former Rhodesia, currently Zimbabwe, and the growing similarities in South Africa, the actual historical apartheid is starting to look pretty good. So I agree with Tim M, except I'm not a secular humanist.

Elkins, the authors make a similar point in the book. I think you might like it.

frelkins, have you read "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence"? I have a big review with perhaps too much summary here. I'm certainly not an authority, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

I'm not sure if my lack of similar experiences when programming is due to my low programming talent or is linked to my poor sense of taste and smell. Though I suppose there could be a common cause for all of them.